Farhad Manjoo wrote about whether one of the most powerful tools for connection in human history is capable of adapting to the world it created.

Farhad Manjoo does an excellent job of explicating the ethical, practical and political quandaries faced by Facebook in its News Feed. Unfortunately, Facebook’s problems are baked into a core philosophy that is all too common in today’s high-flying high-tech concerns: The “ultimate mission is to figure out what users want ... and to give them more of that.”

As I’ve taught my students, the best product and service designers are called to a higher objective. People want fat-laden sugary and salty snacks; they need nutritious food. Users want ready confirmation of their own conclusions and reassurance that their judgments and opinions are sound; what they need is factual information, incisive reporting and well-reasoned analyses.

Whether implemented by algorithms and artificial intelligence or through the intervention of human agents, the relentless pursuit of satisfying wants at the expense of needs will only mire us deeper in the muck of our own making. Larry Constantine, Boston

The infrastructure to fix what’s broken lies not in Facebook’s News Feed team, but in our educational system: When we teach people to be smart news consumers, the algorithm of any one social-media app becomes secondary to the truth itself. Empowering individuals amid this global web to discern fact from fiction is a stronger bulwark against viral misinformation.

Tinkering with the News Feed algorithm or hiring editors to turn Facebook into a media company are tantamount to rearranging the interior design of Facebook’s MPK20 building. To enact real change, we have to focus our remodeling efforts in the halls of education. Mike Sweet, Boston

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CreditIllustration by Giacomo Gambineri

I laughed out loud when Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, said that what they wanted was the site’s users to say, “Hey, my experience today was meaningful.” Was this an article about the main characters in HBO’s “Silicon Valley”?

I am a reluctant user of Facebook; it is useful for some of the work I do, but never do I see it as a “meaningful” part of my day. The paragraphs that followed described a meeting in which engineers were patting themselves on the back for giving users such “meaningful” experiences.

I’m sure most people would agree with me that Facebook hardly makes their days “meaningful.”

And Mark Zuckerberg working on the future of augmented reality instead of Facebook’s problems? Pure Richard Hendricks. Mare Swallow, Chicago

Laila Lalami wrote about how the border has transformed from a vague idea into a formidable, arcane reality.

The covert racism that Donald Trump exploited in promising the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was adroitly exposed as entrapment of the rights of everyone by Laila Lalami’s insightful writing.

While all sovereign bodies inherently control ingress and egress, whether wisely or fearfully, that control becomes self-defeating when police powers run amok. The expected initial inconveniences are surely being corrupted as empowered enforcers expand their reach unabated.

Citizens within the United States are increasingly suffering the humiliation that voting racists envisioned only for immigrants. Trump voters certainly fed their racist instincts when they voted for the candidate’s promise of a wall. The backlash of the unreasonable racial hatred increasingly becomes punishment for all. Joseph H. Carter Sr., Norman, Okla.